All The Young (Ex) Dudes

As we near the end of beta here at Mike HQ, I’d just like to publicly say a big thank you to all our participants who have helped to shape and improve our platform over the past few months – your feedback has been invaluable.

We are currently in the final phases of testing the version of our platform that will form the basis of our commercial offering. Our acceptance testing work flow involves consuming services provided by other organisations to best simulate a real-world usage scenario for our platform. The primary third party service we use is hosted version control. In fact, it is only reasonable to state that Mike has a strong dependency on the existence of such services. It is the first link in the chain of what we here at Mike HQ refer to as the ‘hosted ALM continuum’ – the suite of co-operating and complementary hosted services that provide agile teams with a full outsourced, web-enabled, development ‘stack’. Disclaimer: it is most definitely in our interest to promote hosted version control solutions, as they are an enabler for the use of our own platform.

So, what do we use for testing?

Well, at present we support Subversion repositories that are accessible over Http(s). To simulate repositories that do not require authentication for read access we use Google Code. For those who are unfamiliar with Google Code (there can’t be that many of you surely?) it provides a free collaborative development environment for open source projects, and provides each project with its own Subversion repository. Thanks, Google.

However, our main scenario is retrieving (or updating) source code from repositories that do require authentication and also provide a secure transport using Https. After surveying the landscape, we decided to trial a service offered by Codesion. At the point we signed up (last year) they were known as CVSDude and they have recently re-branded themselves under a new name. We did like the old name – it has allowed us to indulge in some office banter during our acceptance testing phases, which, lets face it, are often not one of the more exciting aspects of software engineering. I won’t bore you with our banter though as it probably falls into the camp of ‘you had to be there’ to seem even remotely funny.

We created our users, groups, roles (they have a bunch of defaults), and assigned them to our project.

We cut-n-paste’d the SVN URL from the project page, into our SVN import statement and we were done.

At this point we now had data we needed to test our platform – our test fixtures are a range of Java projects of different flavours. A side-effect was that it definitely gave us a view of what a slick SaaS sign-up process and after sales care looks like – something for us to aim for with our own offering. Since we started using them we’ve had zero problems. In some of our test cases we hit the repository repeatedly and it gives us the same reliable service every time.

We’d have no hesitation in recommending Codesion if you are looking for a low-cost, industrial-grade hosted solution for Subversion. But, if you are reading guys, we did slightly prefer the old name….sorry ;-).

Here in deepest, darkest Yorkshire (thats a region in the north of the UK for those who don’t know), we just enjoyed the idea of some Californian/Australian VW combi-driving, surfer-types providing us with a VCS service.

Thanks for the comments on the name change guys. We’re still the same “dudes” under the hood, providing people with maximum uptime. We like the old name too, just that the “CVS” part of the name kept us tied to an old technology.
— Mark @ Codesion.com